Good morning, how about a huge bowl of your favorite breakfast cereal: Corporate Consolidation? Sony is in talks to buy Kadokawa, the parent company of Elden Ring developer From Software. Sony sees this company as a solid snack as it says it wants Kadokawa’s various mangas and anime Reuters report. But also because they want all the tasty games they have, like the Danganronpa series, the Octopath Traveler games, and the biggest cornflake of all, the Dark Souls series.
Reuters was told that talks between the companies were ongoing and the deal could be finalized “in the coming weeks.” Kadokawa’s game studios include not only From Software, but also Spike Chunsoft (the people from Danganronpa), Gotcha Gotcha Games (who make the RPG Maker engines), Acquire (owners of Octopath Traveler and Tenchu), and Vic Game Studios (makers of the mobile game Black clover). Owning the Dark Souls developer would also give Sony the rights to publish the third-person mech game roaming Armored Core and warrior souls like Sekiro.
This all makes sense for a gaming company, but it also further slurps studios down the gullet of a megacorporation. Sony owning Fromsoft also gives them the option to pull Bloodborne and make the next Souls game exclusive to PlayStation. However, true console exclusives are uncommon these days – publishers prefer exclusives to be time-limited and eventually released on as many computers as possible. And we, on PC, have gotten almost everything from Sony in recent years if we had to wait a bit. The sequel to Elden Ring probably won’t be as huge, but it will probably still sell like masochistic sizzling cakes.
As for Kadokawa, it suffered a ransomware-based cyberattack this summer, from which it appears to have recovered, and recently confirmed that it has a total 26 game projects in development in all the studios they have. These games will now likely belong to Sony. Perhaps one of them will be able to recover the $200 million that Sony lost on Concord.
